NAME IT, READ IT, TUNE IT, PRINT IT [554]

I am not saying that you shouldn’t buy the Canon TR4750i combination inkjet printer and scanner, I am just saying that using one is never straightforward.

I needed to print out some tickets, sent to me by e-mail, for a visit to an art gallery, a standard failsafe for me because the last thing you want to do is rely entirely on your phone to hold the key to visiting places – the same has gone for airline boarding passes. 

I bought my first inkjet printer when I was completing my A-Levels – carrying on into my degree, I remember the satisfaction of submitting coursework and essays without the added worry of finding somewhere to print them first.

However, that was a time before wi-fi. Attempting to print the tickets from my phone via Apple’s AirPrint standard did not pick up the printer at first, necessitating my restarting the printer. Once my phone finally connected, the printer just fed the paper through itself without making a mark. 

Two further attempts at printing, with the same outcome, led me to shine a light, literally, on the LCD panel on the printer – it is not backlit, and I have put the front-loading printer on a shelf due to available space, which obscures my view of this display – to be told that the device needs to complete a firmware update before it will do anything else. You would have thought Canon could have sent such a message to the print properties screen on my phone, or even print it on the paper I was trying to use.

I later turned on my desktop computer, reasoning I can better see and control what is going on, which made no difference to what the printer was doing. The QR codes showing on the tickets were not appearing in the preview screen, which led to my finding they were being treated as part of the document’s background, instead of as the main reason for doing any of this. Finally, having changed all the settings I could see, I printed the tickets off, and got on with my life.

Rather than the usual gripe about inkjet printer cartridges being so expensive that buying a new set of black and colour cartridges could set you back as much as the printer initially did, a comparison per millimetre of ink with the price of champagne, mine is with the actual ability to print. I let two months pass from the purchase of the tickets until I could sum up the energy to print them out, knowing it will never do it how I want the first time.

I think I may have also expected too much from it for the money. The printer loads and feeds out its paper from the front, meaning you can place it on the shelf, but more expensive models have its control screen on the front flap too, meaning you will be able to see if it needs a firmware update. I also have my suspicions that its ability to print double-sided leads it to spew out an empty page if processing the request becomes too difficult.

Admittedly, the scanner was my main reason for this printer’s purchase, intending for it to eliminate more sheets of paper than it will ever be expected to print. Somehow, I have had no software problems there so far, so perhaps Canon is encouraging me to reduce my use of paper?

TIME TO CLEAN SOME HOUSE [553]

I have spent the last forty minutes filling two Ikea “Pappis” boxes with DVDs I had been keeping in a loft. I will always support owning your own copy of something, but with Blu-ray having now existed for twenty years, my having joined that bandwagon in 2011, looking at these discs has either made me think, “I’ve got this on Blu-ray now,” or, “I’ll come back to this eventually”. Then in the box it goes, to be taken away. VHS, DVD, or Blu-ray, most people will have had this discussion with themselves.

I had an enormous amount of trepidation at beginning to clear out this loft, which I had filled with (most of) a life’s worth of books, comics, CDs and DVDs, especially as it had reached “where do you even start?” levels. But I had been asked to start because the heatwaves that made the summer of 2026 so uncomfortable also highlighted how combustible people’s houses became in that heat, and so much paper in a room without climate control was now asking for trouble.

With limited space elsewhere at home for me to use as storage, I was confronted with the option that immediately confirmed I had too much stuff, leading me to reject it very quickly: paying for a self-storage facility. I could not see myself maintaining an off-site memory hole, being held in conditions even further out of my control.

I had needed to something about this at some point, which had always been “later”, but being asked causes you to reconsider your priorities. Once I had come to terms with having a collection that made me look like a budding hoarder, I could find a way of turning this experience into a positive one.

After tiring myself out on the first weekend by bringing out the items I clearly had no use of like exercise equipment, old PC peripherals and wires, and a typewriter, I established a routine of coming home from work, eating dinner, then clearing out two bags or boxes of items, mostly books. By the weekend, not only could you tell yourself you made a good start, but you also would have spent a week considering whether you ever going to get around to reading, watching or listening to that, and could that question have been asked at the time of acquiring the item?

I now look forward to having this moment of catharsis each evening, and I haven’t gone back to retrieve anything so far. These books, films, TV shows and so on do not become lost just because I don’t have access to them. Remembering that has made parting with them that much easier. 

What this ongoing process has also done is highlight where I used to be hastier in getting rid of things, like having none of my school exercise books because I only deemed the end of term grade as important. Likewise, I had re-bought, some time ago, two books I thought had gone years before: “The Saga of Erik the Viking” by Terry Jones, with painted illustrations by Michael Foreman, and a 1975 book titled “The Science Fiction Book: An Illustrated History” by Franz Rottensteiner, which had been a case of searching online for a book that could match my memory of what was in the pages. I could have saved myself a lot of time.

YOU TOLD ME, PEOPLE LIKE TO SUFFER [552]

Every glowing review received by the film “Coyote vs Acme” has acknowledged the act of having been able to see the film at all, and while I could add another thumbs-up to the pile it has received, the film’s commentary on corporations and the law make it a far more prescient release in 2026 than if Warner Bros had not shut it away as a tax write-off in 2023.

Having now read the original 1990 “New Yorker” humour piece, by Ian Frazier, on which “Coyote vs Acme” is based, presented as a dry opening statement by Wile E. Coyote’s lawyer at a trial, you can see how the film has expanded upon the apparent absurdity of applying cartoon logic to a real-life court case – the gag of an injury on “Mr Coyote’s” body turning him into an accordion being of a “distracting and embarrassing nature” which “has been a major impediment to Mr. Coyote’s pursuit of a normal social life” – while his exclusive use of Acme products is explained as their being the only domestic supplier of rocket sleds, spring-powered shoes and giant rubber bands, exploiting its advantage in the market: “One can only wonder what our trading partners in Western Europe and Japan would make of such a situation, where a giant company is allowed to victimize the consumer in the most reckless and wrongful manner over and over again.”

I loved how the film of “Coyote vs Acme” expanded upon this. With the courtroom relocated from Tempe, Arizona to Albuquerque, New Mexico, now depicted as the home to all Looney Tunes characters, we have a situation where “Human Law” and “Cartoon Law” is delineated separately: Wile E. Coyote’s pursuit of the Road Runner is defined as a line of work “pursuant to Sylvester vs Gonzalez”, in what might be the most clever wordplay I will come across this year.

However, the elastic nature of cartoon characters has led to a callousness in the practice of the law: the lawyer Kevin Avery, played by Will Forte, initially described Wile E. Coyote’s case as “a run of the mill $300 rocket skate case”, having already told Porky Pig, having had a window smash on him, that he could get $250 for that accident. Meanwhile the Acme Corporation, whose CEO is Foghorn Leghorn, and with legal counsel Buddy Crane played by John Cena, has separate human and cartoon product ranges, but has engaged in practices where products designed to help cartoon characters, like erasers to remove visible stink lines, became more recklessly made, using the data from real-life cartoon injuries in order to provide testing for its human product range, under a scheme named Project Sisyphus, confirming why Acme Corporation is happy to pay out a few hundred dollars here or there each time.

I was surprised that this was put in the mouth of a cartoon character, or that Foghorn Leghorn is played so meanly in “Coyote vs Acme”, but for the head of the Acme Corporation to say that pain is the price of progress, and cartoons are not important enough to care if they get harmed, leading to a very affecting moment where Road Runner testifies about the pain he has witnessed being inflicted on Wile E. Coyote, before asking, through Morse Code, “when are you coming back?” I had wondered if this had any correlation with Cory Doctorow’s concept of “enshittification”, which he coincidentally coined during the time of this film’s production in 2022, but while that is more about an online service degrading the experience of its service for its users to benefit its business customers, then doing the same to them to take all the value for itself, it does play into how that term has been more widely adopted to indicate a deliberate degradation in services, products and experiences.

That said, “Coyote vs Acme” is easily the best feature film that the Looney Tunes characters have appeared in, is the best animation/live-action hybrid film since 1988’s “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”, a tribute to how world-building and strong characterisation makes such a Looney world believable, qualms over the use of 3D animation to look 2D notwithstanding. The oddest part of the film, for me, is how the often-used caricature of Peter Lorre is an official Looney Tunes character now, and married to Granny?